Beverage containers sold in restaurant or fast food establishments often include lids for covering the container. Typical lids are plastic molded and snap-fit around the top rim or edge of a beverage container. As drink containers are sold in a variety of dimensions with the top rim of the container having a variety of possible circumferences, a variety of lids are necessarily manufactured to snap fit over a correspondingly dimensioned top rim of a container. Container lids are typically sold to vendors as a stack of lids having a common circumference.
Presently known and utilized lid dispensers are designed to simply hold a stack of lids so that a customer may pull a lid off or from the stack. The lids held in these dispensers, however, are exposed to the environment and are susceptible to contamination by an unsanitary user, particularly if the user touches multiple lids aside from the lid the user is attempting to select. Additionally, these lid dispensers often lead to a customer unintentionally removing multiple lids. It is common behavior that a user who unintentionally removes multiple lids will discard the extra or unintentionally removed lids, or worse yet for the establishment, will leave the lids lying about to collect until removed by an employee of the establishment.
More mechanically sophisticated lid dispensers have also been developed to protect lids from the environment as well as to prevent a user from removing multiple lids. Such previously improved lid dispensers typically rest a stack of lids on platform and, using a spring, press the platform towards an opening in the dispenser. These spring-loaded dispensers, however, have exceptional difficultly accommodating differently sized lids. Accordingly, an establishment may have to buy a new spring-loaded dispenser every time their container supplier changes the lid size on their containers. Spring-loaded lid dispensers are also more likely to mechanically fail due to their complexity. The result is that spring-loaded dispensers are quite costly and often disfavored by establishments. Accordingly, a need for a simpler yet more effective lid dispenser is greatly needed.